Identifying Taylor Rules in Macro-Finance Models

NBER Working Paper No. 19360Issued in August 2013NBER Program(s): APEFG

Identification problems arise naturally in forward-looking models when agents observe more than economists. We illustrate the problem in several New Keynesian and macro-finance models in which the Taylor rule includes a shock unseen by economists. We show that identification of the rule's parameters requires restrictions on the form of the shock. A state-space treatment verifies that this works when we observe the state of the economy and when we infer it from observable macroeconomic variables or asset prices.